Chennai's first monsoon under TVK arrives with no new flood defences — and the same old flood maps

Chennai's tryst with the northeast monsoon is days away, and the city's flood defences are exactly where the previous government left them: unfinished, partly on paper, and in several places entirely theoretical. The Greater Chennai Corporation's own workers are still racing to complete routine desilting and drain works ahead of a deadline the state government has already extended once — to October 15. The monsoon is expected by mid-October. There is no margin left. When a city's flood plan is completed in the same week the skies open, it is not a plan; it is a prayer. Activists who have tracked Chennai's water bodies for years say the newly elected TVK government has started no major new flood-mitigation work beyond routine desilting. Haris Sulthan, an activist from Padi, points out that the five drinking-water reservoirs together hold just 4.5 TMC against a total capacity of 11.7 TMC — the lakes are dry, but the flood drains that must carry storm water away have not been rebuilt. He welcomed the government's cancellation of what he called 'cosmetical lake-front development' tenders, but said the real work — desilting, removing water hyacinth, deepening lakes — remains undone in flood-prone Medavakkam, Chitlapakkam, Hasthinapuram, Kadaperi, Ambedkar Road, Jothi Nagar and Sunnambu Kolathur. A senior official of the corporation itself has admitted what residents have long known: much of south Chennai's flooding is, in his words, '100 per cent man-made' — the product of unchecked urbanisation, encroachments around the Pallikaranai marshland and the IT corridor, choked watercourses, and canals in T. Nagar and Mambalam that he described as sewers because of illegal sewage connections. The paper trail is damning. A Comptroller and Auditor General report tabled in the Tamil Nadu Assembly recently found that the restoration of the Mambalam canal under the Smart City programme — a Rs 59.4 crore project — was left significantly unfinished, and that the civic body took no action against the contractor responsible. The corporation is now desilting the same canal again, in a 300-metre stretch near Valluvar Kottam where it narrows to three metres, aiming to raise its carrying capacity from 200 to 500 cusecs. Nine encroachments still remain along the canal. Meanwhile, the human cost of administrative drift is already visible. In Srinivasapuram in Pattinapakkam, 1,536 public-housing tenements stand damaged — collapsed ceilings, cracked walls, weakened balconies. Of the 224 families identified for relocation to Loop Road, 197 have been shifted. The rest are still waiting, living, as resident Usharani put it, 'in fear every day'. Another resident, Selvam, said a portion of a building collapsed near his children while they were studying. For these families, the monsoon is not weather. It is a structural threat. A government that cancelled cosmetic tenders deserves credit for the instinct. But instinct is not infrastructure. Chennai's first monsoon under the TVK will be graded not on announcements, but on whether water drains where it should — and whether the city's poorest survive it in homes that should have been repaired long ago.